>Isn't that the history of civilization?
Spoken like an aristocrat.
Keynes, from My Early Beliefs:
>We were not aware that civilisation was a thin and precarious crust
>erected by the personality and will of a very few, and only
>maintained by rules and conventions skilfully put across and
>guilefully preserved. Whe had no respect for traditional wisdom or
>the restraints of custom. We lacked reverence...
Keynes on Marxism (CW IX, p. 258):
>How can I accept a doctrine which sets up as its bible...an obsolete
>economic textbook which I know to be not only scientifically
>erroneous but without interest or application for the modern world?
>How can I adopt a creed which, preferring the mud to the fish,
>exalts the boorish proletariat above the bourgeois and the
>intelligentsia who, with whatever faults, are the quality in life
>and surely carry the seeds of all human advancement? Even if we need
>a religion how can we find it in the turbid rubbish of the Red
>bookshops? It is hard for an educated, decent, intelligent son of
>western Europe to find his ideals here, unless he has first suffered
>some strange and horrid process of conversion which has changed all
>his values.